Browsing All Posts filed under »superstition«

An old post of mine – from the middle of 2007 – has recently been replied to by someone who takes their astrology very seriously. Anthony Louis, who has published books on astrology and tarot, runs quite an active blog on the topics. His somewhat curious response is quite short so I’ll quote it in […]

Just finished a first draft of an article that is to go into a volume edited by Dimitris Xygalatas and William McCorkle. The volume is to be called Mental Culture: Toward a Cognitive Science of Religion and is to show how modern cognitive science of religion is connected back to traditional approaches to the study […]

Anyone who has ever talked to me about science has probably heard me get all excited about all sorts of methodologies. I am particularly likely to get all flushed by very simple methods that manage to get at something that seemed hard to get good data about. I have on several occasions on this blog […]

My Czech colleague, Ales Chalupa, who organised the very valuable meeting on cognitive science of religion I attended last year is co-organising another, much bigger meeting this year. The International Study of Religion in Central and Eastern Europe Association conference will take place in December of this year and is to have a section devoted […]

At the end of last month I went for a couple of days to Aarhus to give a talk on how the magic/religion distinction can be explained in terms of a dual inheritance model of religion. The Religion, Cognition and Culture people there also know Christophe Heintz and we set it up so that both […]

Luke Muehlhauser runs a podcast series of interviews with various philosophers and scientists that focuses on issues connected to atheism – one of his previous guest was Graham Oppy, who is an Australian atheist philosopher of religion and, as it happens, the guy who helped John Bigelow supervise my doctorate. The discussions tend to be […]

On May 21st I will be giving a talk in Aarhus to the Religion, Cognition and Culture people in Aarhus. Here is the abstract: Explaining the magic/religion distinction using a dual inheritance model The dual inheritance model of religion seeks to explain it as based upon cognitive byproducts that have been co-opted for prosocial functions. […]